Posts Tagged ‘Censorship’

The problem of “fake news” cannot be disjointed from censorship and propaganda… Censoring the truth, or replacing it by lies is not very different. The solution to this steering of the public mind into subjugation is to recognize quality thinking and information as “PUBLIC UTILITY”… From the Google-Facebook duopoly, to the most modest websites, as yours truly (legislatively enforced). That means, dear New York Times, and various university professor sites, no more censorship…

In a few hours, I was censored three times, twice related to Nobel, not so noble, Paul Krugman, the self-described “Conscience of a Liberal”, and his network. More sad than infuriating.

I had sent to Paul Krugman a pretty neutral piece for his post “The Force of Decency Awakens”. Krugman claimed that the same emotion, decency, waking up, was the root cause for the renewed fight against sexism, and against guns. Decency comes from the present participle of decere “to be fitting or suitable“. Krugman apparently found my comment unsuitable and inappropriate. However that comment was purely about how and why plutocracy grew and how that related to indecency. My comment actually supported what Krugman said, it understood it, it stood under it. Krugman should have been happy to be understood, with not one word against him. But, no, he censored my comment nevertheless (someone at the NYT told me Krugman censors me personally). When Krugman does this, I am always baffled: does he really not understand, or does he censors me because he is afraid of the shareholders of his employers (some of the world’s wealthiest men), or is he simply jealous like the wicked queen was of Snow White?

In his post, Krugman pontificated that:”Political scientists have a term and a theory for what we’re seeing on #MeToo, guns and perhaps more: “regime change cascades.””

The link was looking at only four revolutions, and asked for big money to go beyond the abstract. I smelled a rotten fish. I looked at that site. It claims: “REMARQ is a collaboration network from RedLink, designed for researchers and qualified users.” “Qualified users?” I sent a comment. The “Remarq Team” looked at the title of my Aristotle Destroyed Democracyessay (I was electronically informed) and, within minutes, sent me something that got plastered on my browser: “The Remarq team rejected your qualified user request and comment on article Regime Change Cascades: What We Have Learned from the 1848 Revolutions to the 2011 Arab Uprisings. 2018-02-27 14:37”. To be “rejected” by a “team” sounds more abusive than polite.

The theme of ADD is that the respect for Aristotle’s political work is the respect for monarchy, the rule of one. Aristotle’ s main political idea constitutes the bottom principles of today’s political “science”: a few individuals (generally male) should lead We The People, as if we were sheep. This is not idle talk, and a claim Aristotle was a bad influence: Aristotle was actually the leader and mentor of the small group of vicious men who launched the Hellenistic Regimes (which later encouraged the destruction of the Republican spirit in Rome).

The idea of the rule of one, monarchy, defended at the highest intellectual level, is, of course, also the main idea of Judeo-Christo-Islamism, with its big boss, God (which not coincidentally grew with the Hellenistic regimes). Attacking Aristotle, for those who believe in the Guide Principle (Deutsch: Führerprinzip)is like attacking Allah for the worst Jihadists. Most intellectual professionals paid for their mental work are there to enforce the established order, they do now what the church used to do in the Middle Ages. To rule over minds, one will find more efficient to rule the souls, rather than to wield chains. Here the opinion of Paul Nizan about paid intellectuals, paid to have the correct thoughts and feelings, the watchdogs:

One difference between someone like me or Nizan (who lived in the Middle East, Europe, Africa) and the political scientists at the “Remarq Team” (who presumably didn’t grew up nor lived in such places) is that I am not paid to tell lies, lies are not what Nizan or I, profess… As paid condottiere of things intellectuals presumably are (why else would they think it is important that others do NOT see my thoughts? If they are so bad, why don’t they rot by themselves?) This observation is not new: since ever, intellectuals have been paid as “watchdogs” (to use Paul Nizan’s expression; Nizan, a friend of Sartre, enlisted in the French army to fight Nazism. Nizan died in combat at Dunkirk, 23 May 1940, part of the enormous French army protecting the evacuation of 330,000 elite soldiers, including most of the professional British army (future instructors to the mass army they would teach), against the entire, vengeful Nazi army.

What is clear is that a lot of people are spending a lot of efforts censoring the Internet. The NYT censored my comment on the Krugman essay referred above.

A physicist specialized in Dark Matter censored my comment on Dark Matter, on her site (not the first time!) although the idea I have been pushing is incredibly simple (thus potentially revolutionary). Whereas people like that physicist are pushing MOND, MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, I am pushing MOQ (MOdified Quantum; which I also call Sub Quantum Patrice Reality, an allusion to the fact that the Copenhagen Interpretation, and its ilk are NOT real…).

A good reason for not having MOND is that, modifying gravitational mass, as MOND de facto does, opens the can of worms of having to modify inertial mass, and, if not, why not… Whereas MOQ/SQPR fills in a gap in the usual Copenhagen Interpretation and its ilk (the other way to solve the gap is the Many Worlds/Multiverse, in other words, angels on a pin, with no limits, whatsoever…) As an exchange on the comments of the Dwarf Galaxy disk problem (predicted by MOQ/SQPR, not by MOND, nor LambdaCDM…) shows, my comment was finally published. It made an analogy between the present situation and the epicycles (an old point of view of mine now adopted by many physicists)… But I am going in much more details. The epicycles’ theory was a consequence of the wrong, ridiculously wrong, Aristotelian physics, at the root, and it may well be what is going on now… Buridan resuscitated heliocentrism, because, first, he got the physics right (also heliocentrism was obvious…)

Delaying comments destroy the debate: the New York Times delayed my comments, by several days, systematically, for years: that allowed the NYT to claim it practiced no censorship (in correspondence with me)… although nobody would read them, then… and then the NYT decided to just censor ALL of my comments, for years. My point is that this sort of steering of public opinion should be illegal, in a public utility (see below)…

I am used to something paradoxical for whom has never been employed by academia (I have ONLY been employed by academia), the scholar as a thief. I was, bad luck, next to some of the greatest, most decorated thieves ever, one of them was one of my best friends (until I discoverer to my horror and depression that he was a thief… There were pages on his thievery at some point in the New York Times; not only he helped then to demolish my career, but he demolished the career of the famous G. Perelman… Perelman got the top prizes in mathematics, refused to accept them, as he said that, then, he would have to tell the truth, and the world of top math would be revealed as the BS it is. Then an angry and discouraged Perelman gave up math (contrarily to repute, math is a social activity; can’t do it when the people you talk to are, you know, thieves, among other problems…).

I had this problem with Black Holes: I suggested, long ago, that the standard reasoning was insufficient because it neglected Quantum effects (say Quark stars, etc.) Now this point of view is standard wisdom.

Thievery is a general problem in research, in a time of insufficient budgets. I have known the detailed case of junior researchers (not just yours truly) seeing their papers rejected, and then senior “peer reviewers” running away with the ideas… which they had just rejected for publication. Greed is not just a plutocratic problem, nor does plutocracy necessarily have to do with making billions. Verily, the power (kratos) of evil (Pluto) is great… especially when directed at honest to goodness thinkers.

Strange world. A tweet of mine, relating to the Bernie Sanders’ Twitter account, was also “made unavailable”. What did my tweet say? Here it is: “Problem: Democrats view as too left-wing the taxes advocated by Carnegie, the USA’s first billionaire (19th Century)! Carnegie explained in detail why it was necessary to tax enormous wealth enormously. The only deep reason for taxation is to prevent hyper wealth accumulation!”https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/965670396715511809 …

Am I too left-wing for Bernie? Or, more to the point, is Carnegie now too left-wing for the Democrats and US “Socialists”? Anyway, my tweet was removed by the powers that be (such a dangerous tweet, I agree!) At least Senator Bernie Sanders just changed his position on some guns… Tweeted Bernie, 2/28/2018:

“We should not be selling assault weapons in this country. These weapons are not for hunting. They are military weapons for killing human beings.” I replied @BernieSanders:

Hillary Clinton used to complain that Bernie Sanders sided with the NRA. Glad to see the clear statement against military assault weapons..(See? Even Hillary can be right sometimes…)

And what do many Internet agents do? Steer, censor and contrive. Indeed, neither Google nor Facebook create content, they are content to steer We The Sheeple towards their idea of decency. They are electronic leeches.

It is clear that none of this is innocent. what is happening on the Internet is exactly, on a much grander scale, what Putin is accused of doing: a few individuals and their obsequious servants, manipulating public opinion. So what to do?

Public utilities provide an infrastructure necessary to society. They are subject to public control, beyond that of standard private industry. In the case of media on the Internet, the infrastructure would be the most important infrastructure of all, the infrastructure of truth!

As it is, there is a serious problem. As David Chavern has it in the WSJ in “Protect the News From Google and Facebook“: “A partial exemption from antitrust laws would help publishers and readers (Feb. 25, 2018): The news business is suffering, but not because people don’t want news. They do—more than ever. The problem is that the money generated by news audiences flows mostly to Google and Facebook , not to the reporters and publishers who produce excellent journalism… newspaper advertising revenue fell from $22 billion in 2014 to $18 billion in 2016 even as web traffic for the top 50 U.S. newspapers increased 42%.

Local news is most at risk. As print circulation declines, community news publishers have the hardest time adapting to the ever-changing demands of Facebook and Google algorithms… Tech savvy, digital-only publishers are also struggling. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said in December that Google and Facebook are “paying content creators far too little for the value they deliver to users,” and that “this puts high-quality creators at a financial disadvantage, and favors publishers of cheap media.”“

And the Wall Street Journal to pursue:“Google and Facebook have become the primary and de facto regulators of the news business, and governments around the world are starting to recognize the danger. British Prime Minister Theresa May announced earlier this month that her government would review the economics of internet news consumption. Regulators in Germany, Israel and South Korea are investigating how Google’s business practices have disrupted the media market and harmed publishers and consumers. U.S. regulators, on the other hand, have rarely looked into Google or Facebook—and never at their influence in the news marketplace.

Some voices on the left and right are calling for Google and Facebook to be regulated as utilities. But there is an easier solution: exempt news publishers from certain aspects of antitrust regulation.

U.S. antitrust laws, designed to promote fair competition and prevent consolidation, actually make it harder for traditional news outlets to compete with Silicon Valley giants. Under current law, for instance, news publishers cannot get together and agree to withhold their product unless they receive a return on their investment.”

YouTube (owned by Google) warned some accounts which had reported that the latest school mass shooting in Florida was a “hoax” and the victims were “actors”. Nice, but those sort of “fake news” are not really worse than decades of lies from the Main Stream Media. Lies, or non-saids (French magazines reports that US president Jimmy Carter started the war in Afghanistan, which killed many millions, from his own administration, were censored, so US Americans really don’t know that! By the way, my point of view that Carter, Clinton and Obama were fake, not to say evil, is spreading. In the case of Obama, that depressed me….) For Carter, July 3, 1979 attack against Afghanistan, please consider:

What to do is that there should legal recourse against any medium declared a public utility, and yet, practicing censorship:

To become a medium of public utility, there should be, and could be, two ways:

Being declared to be so, by legislative decision, and Google and Facebook, and all the major media, certainly should be.

Applying to become so (for example this site would).

Any medium of public utility would have to satisfy some requirements, such as trying to tell the truth when claiming to do so (poetry and fiction would be allowed, but under those labels). Public utility media would also have to avoid censorship, and be ready to justify it (that mean be ready to justify when censorship is applied; for example, the NYT would be required to justify why it censored me systematically when I comment Krugman’s posts…)

More than a decade ago, a philosophy site banned me for life for “fantastic logic” and stealing (from myself) my own (!) intellectual property (which I had made the mistake to put on their site as comments; so they viewed my ideas as their own thereafter, and forbid me to publish said ideas of mine on my old, Tyranosopher, site…) Ridiculous, but at least they provided some reason (last year I learned that the main, very famous philosopher behind that site, an old enemy of mine, called Searle, has been accused of sexual harassment by many girls and women, and was suspended from his prestigious university position; that didn’t surprise me, as I considered him a thief already… Sexual harassment is a form of thievery, and assault.)

When a medium is unwilling to give any reason for the censorship it applies, it should not be given the privileges associated to journalism, the respect of implied scholarship, nor the prestigious aura of “public utility”.

On The Fascists Who Own And Dominate Us, And What We Read, And Want to Crank It Up.

When Google Plots to Make Patrice Ayme’ Disappear:

One of my readers was struck by the fact that I claimed that “extravagant wealth was outlawed in Rome”. This was indeed the law under the Republic. When, thanks to globalization, some of the wealthiest Romans were able to invest overseas, they build giant fortunes (the philosopher Seneca, who taught Nero, and died from it, used to joke that he didn’t know how many latifundia, absolutely gigantic farms with armies of slaves, he owned and on how many lands). When the Gracchi brothers saw this, they tried to reinforce the wealth limitation laws.

By then the wealthiest could afford private armies, not just private ships. Those armies were used to kill the Gracchi (although they . Their laws had been passed though, and for the following generations the “Populares” would try to have them enacted. This all ended with the assassination of Iulius Caesar, who was the most famous and most capable leader the “Populares” ever had. Now we have a situation arising which potentially equals the worst. Socrates had been condemned for “corrupting the youth”. Google apparently suggests users of its search engine to find the same about my work:

How did I find this? To help my reader, I did a search under the key words “Rome Absolute Wealth Limit”. (As can be seen in two places, up and down, on the screen.) It produced thousands of hits all of them headed by my own:

Google, in its generosity, let me appear on their search engine. That’s not a given. It used to be a given. Long time ago, so did Yahoo let me appear on their search engine. I would search “Athens direct democracy” on Yahoo search engine, and proudly find myself at the head of the list. Then, one day, I disappeared from Yahoo. Completely. (Now it’s Yahoo which will disappear!) It is as if someone had decided to ban me. I told some people in the Silicon Valley about it. Including employees of Yahoo. They told me I was paranoid. Even a San Francisco Bay Area homeless bum told me so. (At that point, I knew how deep the search engine propaganda was!)

But I was still on BING and Google. Then, one day only my essays older than ten years survived in BING. All others disappeared, even when typed in full. I interpreted this as being banned from BING. Just as I am banned from the New York Times. Such bans are highly successful. I am especially banned from outwardly left sites (Daily Kos, etc.) The plutos who own or hold them are afraid that what John Lennon called the “fu…ing peasants” find out that, instead of being free and master of their destinies, they are just the opposite… And all their ideas are precisely those their masters wanted them to have.

The surprise came from reading on the right of my essay title as produced by Google something new:

“REPORT INAPPROPRIATE PREDICTIONS”

With a down arrow. I clicked on the arrow and found that readers were given the following choices to evaluate my work:

Hateful

Sexually Explicit

Violent

Dangerous and harmful activity

Other

***

Only my essay was thus adorned (out terns of thousands).

By the way, Google “Legal Department” wants you to request “content change”.

It is my (frequently repeated) observation that it is Western plutocrats who make Islamist propaganda possible, with their optical fibers, satellites, and software. That, no doubt is a hateful, violent, dangerous and a harmful activity. Many plutocrats could be hurt while shooting that movies…

The questionnaire above leads readers to identify “limits to wealth” to “limit to growth” and the latter to hatred, sex, violence, harm, and the cause of “poor schooling”. It is clearly oriented to censor any suggestion that extreme wealth should be limited. Indeed the title of my essay was unambiguous: “LIMIT WEALTH ABSOLUTELY”.

To all the preceding, search engines will reply that they are private companies, they do what they want. No, twice wrong: private moral persons, including companies have to respect the law. Now those technologies are news, Justinian refurbishment of the law, 15 centuries ago didn’t anticipate them. Yet, as Montesquieu pointed out, there is a “spirit of the laws” (“Esprit des Lois”).

All and any private company which becomes a global social utility, has, since Roman times, and Athenian times, be the object of special laws requiring special social duties. If search engines exert bias of no social utility (a fortiori if they are self-serving), they should be constrained to do so.

In other news, Prince Harry received Barack Obama at Kensington Palace. They discussed, we are told, mental health and the Manchester attack. The implication being that one is related to the other. In other words, there is no Islamism hostile to civilization, just crazy people out there. Those crazed people justify the police state, including finding those who think there should be limits to wealth crazy and harmful. This is disinformation: the Internet and TV, let alone hordes of career semi-intellectuals, have vigorously pushed Islamism, in the last 80 years, throughout the West.

Prince Harry was famous for running around naked in Las Vegas, while high on drugs. (This was immortalized in many pictures. Hard to deny.) Now in the British plutocracy, he disposes of historical palace, to pose next to Obama’s eternally plastic grin of bon banania… Nothing changed since the vague revolt of the punk wave, 40 years ago (the Sex Pistols attacked the Queen, but, in the end, the insults didn’t work. What works is to detail the exact nature of the subjugation mechanisms. And this the plutos understand perfectly, that’s what they want to block.).

The aim was to divide We The People and put civilization itself, and its spirit, under suspicion. Now we are reaching higher heights: saying that we should limit wealth absolutely, Google suggest, is hateful, harmful, violent, sexually explicit, and endangers schooling itself.

Sometimes dictatorship comes in stealthily. There is nothing stealthy about forbidding to read advanced materials (if one is not found in search engines, one does not exist). The Catholic Church did this for six centuries during the Middle Ages, by putting books at the “index”, and extended its rule, and the plutocrats (“aristocrats”) who were along for the ride, by just as much (it finished with a number of extremely bloody wars and revolutions in Britain, Germany, France, among others…).

Meanwhile Merkel just came out storming from her meetings with Trump. Merkel is a physicist, she is usually careful, and always rational. However, Merkel was firm, not to say Hitler style, making great gestures with a closed fist:“We Europeans MUST take our destiny in our own hands…” Zehr gut (just what Trump said…). German rebellion against the USA plutocracy, at last. OK, so now the obvious ally in this endeavor is just west: Frankreich, France. The European Union has been clear (but so far rather impotent) about the abuses of US search engines (tweaking searches for self-service, and tax evasion). Time to do something about it. I already contacted two lawyers…

Morality is technology dependent. Always has been, always will be. Indeed, morality, the mores, are the behaviors which have proven sustainable. As technology varies, so does sustainability.

Having a rapacious attitude can also be sustained for centuries. Many said that about Rome. It was viewed to be the case of the Assyrian civilization, around 27 centuries ago. The Aztecs similarly had made moral, even divine to cut their enemies in pieces and eat them.

Right, Yet Order Zero Approach, Because, In the Next Step, Righteousness Itself Has to Be Interrogated, Though

The USA’s morality is founded not just on “Jesus” and his “Bible”, but also on the most sacred “philosophers” of the so-called (Anglo-Saxon!) Enlightenment. In the USA, to be “enlightened” traditionally means to believe in the established order, racist, enslaving, and the so-called “free market” with its “invisible hand” (Pluto!). One has to be an “empiricist”, following “pragmatism” (and that means having no moral principles, but for those of the Bible).

So, naturally enough, having defied the philosophical foundation of the USA, I was immediately “banned” from a “philosophy” site.

This is not the first time this happens. Once a site where Searle, a “philosopher” famous for his “Chinese Room” thought experiment, banned me. Searle’s site claimed I was culprit of “intellectual property theft”, because the site claimed it owned all and any of my ideas, once they were published there. I was also accused of “fantastic Logic”. Part of the truth, of course is that the Chinese Room is itself a duplication of the so-called “Turing Test” which (idiotically) claims a computer to be intelligent if it can pass for a human in a conversation. Searle, a professor at a university where I taught, use to force his students to buy his fantastically overpriced tiny and worthless books. The same university is now involved into a tidal wave of sexual harassment cases: a professor forcing students to buy his fantastically overpriced books is also a rapist, methinks.

Another of my crime, yesterday was to claim that Kuhn, author of “The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions”, a revered figure of American philosophy of science, never said anything special.

Instead I was told that philosophy is “Discursive Rational Argumentation”. This is highly redundant: ratio (from which reason comes), comes from “logic”, which itself means discourse, which is not different from “argumentation”.

Instead I hold that philosophy is “Disruptive Rational Art”

Insults themselves can be an art: Obama flew to Saudi Arabia, flying 12,000 kilometers. He was welcomed by the governor of Riyadh. No minister, no king.

Saudi ire is mostly caused by the US rapprochement with Iran, although Obama’s artful inefficiency is also a legitimate cause of irritation. (Not to say Iran is innocent: Iranian psychology is a study in the deepest contradictions imaginable, due to the rape of Iranian civilization by much beloved Arabian engineered Islam; a classical case of the Stockholm syndrome, which should be re-baptized as the Iranian syndrome…)

The alliance between the US presidency and the king of Saudi Arabia dates from 1945. It has proven quite sustainable, although it’s a spiral descending as a co-dependency with hell. In a way, the USA did with Saudi Arabia what it did with Hitler: encourage the worst, and milk it (the argument that Britain, Germany and France have done the same is entirely valid… but they followed the US lead, and their reward is Wahhabist terror all over Europe).

The Internet is a new technology. It empowers completely new behaviors: potentially all can communicate with all, and talk about anything. Thus it requires, and will evolve, a new morality. But there are many possibilities. Some good, some evil.

The Internet allows intellectual exchanges, gifts we make to each other called ideas. The wisest behavior, among intellectuals, in tentative debate, consist in getting inspired by the best ideas others have to offer, and forget the rest. This is the best first order approach.

However when the most impactful ideas are deleterious, such as a stealth advocacy of slavery or greed, it is another matter entirely. When John Locke teaches hypocrisy as the highest mood (condemning slavery in his writing, while investing in it and fostering it, in his actions), he deserves strident condemnation.

I am banned from many sites, from the Huffington Post, to the Guardian (for the unexpected sin of “blogging the Qur’an!”). I view “banning” and censoring unwise. The New York Times, since before the invasion of Iraq, has literally censored thousands of my comments (I have been a full subscriber for decades). Said comments’ positions were later embraced by the New York Times.

I have never banned anybody from my site (including Jihadists, Fundamentalists, and the occasional Nazi). I put just one crazed maniac in moderation, and he gave up. I systematically contradict offensive material, though, in appropriate, thus scathing, terms (it’s generally enough to make miscreants give up).

I don’t “make things up”. Except for the occasional rare joke. I don’t make things up, to the best of my knowledge, I never do, and never did, because reality, my way, always beats fiction (especially fiction the way others have it, which puts me to sleep).

Mary Beard, a professional Roman historian, in her SPQR, brazenly claims the Common Wisdom that Marcus Aurelius was the first emperor in a long while to have a live official son, but a cursory research reveals that Hadrian (likely), and Antoninus Pius (certainly) had two official sons. I did not make it up.

The devil starts with getting the details wrong… and learning to live with that.

Long ago at Stanford I was scolded by the finest and brightest, for “meditating” on Black Hole theory. My “meditation” became standard lore only recently. I had a somewhat similar experience in pure mathematics. Ultimately, what motivates academics and scientists, and philosophers the most, is their own advancement, and that means the advancement of their tribe. Richard Feynman discovered this, he said, after being elected to the American Academy of Sciences. He decided that was not acceptable, and resigned.

My answer to these academic shenanigans? Do more of what I always did, and damn the torpedoes. I am not writing for a career, but for the issues themselves. My career belongs to the future, after I am gone.

The greatest, oldest, most human, and most noble trading, is that of ideas.

And where do ideas come from? Not just the pulling of oxen, but the spur of the moment. This is why Internet spontaneity is sacred. Academia was a grove Plato liked. With the Internet, the grove is the world.

By this question I do not mean how it was technically possible for the Nazis to massacre deliberately more than fifteen million innocent civilians whom they had arrested for no reason but hatred. Modern technology is the obvious answer: government propaganda to mislead people, firearms to herd the innocent, trains to transport them, gas to kill them efficiently.

What I mean is how come the Holocaust of millions of “Jews”, and an even greater number of millions of other innocent civilians falling under other categories, was possible, in the name of the German nation? How come the Germans went along? Was not Germany the country in the world which was the most literate, the one with the most readers in 1900? How could such a country sink so low?

“Children, What Do You Want From the Guide?” The Guide Loved Children, Children Loved the Guide

Obviously, reading is not everything: one has to read Philosophically Correct material (PhC material). The Germans read a lot of materialistic, fascist, imperialistic, militaristic and hyper nationalistic propaganda. That brought their wisdom in the gutter, made them forget the human nature of humanity, and made them much less human than even a simple illiterate fisherman in any other country (say). One thing Germans were not short of, was kolossal naivety.

Still, how come the German nation went so rabid? The answer is simple. Another technology was at work: propaganda, combined with modern means to achieve secrecy and disinformation. One can see this by a closer look at history, a page in the history of moods.

By early 1945, the Great Reich still existed, and fought for survival, attacked on all fronts by all its enemies, including Poles, French, Brits, Canadians, Soviets, Americans, etc. As the Soviets penetrated old Prussia, they submitted cities to horrendous bombardment, and when they found Germans alive, chances were that those Germans were women and children (as the men had died in combat). I am not aware of mass exactions against children (so many were dead already), but certain women were put to what Soviet troops saw as very good use, hundreds of times a day.

The Nazis related with relish to their own population, the total, and barbarous extermination of the German East, the murdering of centuries of civilization, and warned the masses that so would be the fate of all of Germany. Therefore, the German population had to fight with the energy of despair, and the natural enmity between Soviets and democracies would do the rest.

The fanatical discourses and orders of the hysterically vicious Nazi leadership was not heeded. Instead, many Germans and local authorities produced white flags, and tried to surrender. In spite of the fact the Nazis viewed that as treason, and the penalty for this was immediate execution.

Most Germans knew Germany was being destroyed in the East, civilians were submitted to unspeakable treatment, tens of thousands of german civilians were dying every few days, and still, deep down, they felt it was deserved.

Now remember that in May 1940, the German Panzer army had been able to break through the French fortifications on the Meuse by using suicide bombers.

So why were Germans so much less keen to die for the Great Reich in 1945 than in 1940?

Why did the the mood change in Germany?

Auschwitz, the Holocaust.

By 1945, average Germans knew intimately that the Nazis, we the Germans, had did a terrible thing, the most terrible thing to “those poor people”, the Jews.

The mood in Germany was that Germany had sinned, and was punished for the unspeakable horror it had visited on the Jews. (Among others.)

Why did that revelation not happen earlier?

Because the Nazis kept the Holocaust secret enough to be able to deny it.

What would have had happened if, by January 1941, say, when the Holocaust had already been launched, average Germans had known what was going on? That the Great Reich had deliberately killed millions of Poles?

Well, quickly enough, the military would have revolted and decapitated the Nazi power structure (as it is there was a huge conspiracy to do so, but it mostly failed because not enough in the military were in the know of the extent of the exactions, or suffering from pressure at home condemning said exactions). The German military had the means to kill the Nazis, but lacked enough motivation. Only the exhibition of enough Nazi atrocities atrocious enough, would have provided that motivation.

If average Germans had known how atrocious their government was, how much atrocities they had visited on innocent civilians, if they had know their government bombed flour mills to starve millions of Poles to death, in 1939, let alone create an extermination camp at Auschwitz, to kill Polish civilians, and then started to kill innocent Jews, even innocent German Jews, then average Germans would have been revolted by Nazism… As most of them were by 1945.

So it is secrecy which made the Holocaust possible. And this has important lessons for today, and the freedom and wisdom of the Internet.

Poor Marine Le Pen! My heart swells for her, and not just just a bit of self-interested worry, too. Marine just thought she could do like yours truly, and post on the Internet some of the Islamist State propaganda (just to show the horror, and condemn it! However, the French State has now decided that the messenger was culprit of the message).

Last August, the Islamist State released a video of its assassination of James Foley, a journalist who went missing in Syria in 2012. Ms. Le Pen posted images of his killing, and those of others, in reply to a well known French pundit who had compared her party, the Front National, to the Islamist State. Bourdin the Cretin, paid propagandist on RMC et BFMTV, Wednesday 16 December evoked a “une communauté d’esprit” between two “formes de repli identitaire” (identity grouping), the rise of the National Front and the rise of Jihadism. Bourdin’s guest insisted that the Islamist State and the Front National “resemble each other” (by the same token, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are also Islamist State! And actually so are all those who prefer the natives to strangers: patriotism has become an absolute evil, according to anti-“populist” propaganda!)

This was weird in many ways: first there are only 4,000 Jihadists in France, whereas nearly seven millions voted for the National Front last Sunday. Second, the National Front, and Marine le Pen in particular, are precisely against all what the Islamist State stands for. But the “French Theory” sort of “philosophy” has induced a mood of sheer madness where everything is mashed up: call black, white, white, black, and then chuckle all is grey, so it does not matter.

Naturally enough, Ms. Le Pen put on her twitter accounts pictures of Islamist State executions, pointing out that the National Front did not do that, and had always been against that.

The Foley family whined that: “We are deeply disturbed by the unsolicited use of Jim for le Pen’s political gain… the tweets “add to the family’s pain”. Really? Is it this, or are you feeling the urge to milk your fame? Why would that disturb you that someone remind us of your son’s martyrdom? Because your son is best forgotten?

I guess we better forget that Jim Foley was assassinated atrociously, according to his parents, that’s the best way to ignore honor him. Those foolish follies seem to show a healthy disregard for Jim Foley’s calling. Jim’s calling was to inform people. Inform them of what? The most significant events. And what’s more significant than atrocities committed in the name of a religion? (The Foley family added Le Pen’s “actions” were against what their son stood for, that’s why they were indignant. So I guess, according to them, their son was all for Islamism, since Marine Le Pen is against it?)

Le Pen said she did not know it was a picture of James Foley, and took it down immediately after she became aware of the foolish family disingenuous protest (as the family’s little PC political plug against Le Pen demonstrates). (Notas Bene: if terrorists kill me, as extreme right wing terrorists tried this once already, I am for putting on the Internet pictures of my gory assassination, which will thence demonstrate further one of my points, post mortem.)

Plutocratic media immediately jumped on the occasion to scream after Marine Le Pen. One propagandist went on Le Pen’s twitter account to report her indignation, feeling “deeply violated” by the “grotesque pictures”… As if Le Pen herself had cut the throats of the victims of Islamism.

I guess, the same person would have been “deeply violated” by being shown “grotesques pictures” of Nazi assassinations, and would have asked authorities to hide them, and justice to strike those who showed pictures of Nazi atrocities. Actually, this is exactly what is presently happening in France.

In other words, all those who published pictures of the collapsing World Trade Center are abominable, abject accomplices of Al Qaeda, and those who published pictures of Nazi mass executions are abominable, abject accomplices of Nazism, and so on.

What is clear is that the French Interior minister is such an idiot, that he makes even Dr, Goebbels sound like a genius. Or then the French Interior Minister is keen to go beyond the worst caricature of dictatorship and misinformation found in Orwell’s “1984”. Even the minutes of Joan of Arc’s trial don’t exhibit a similar madness on the part of her obviously biased accusers (and no, I am not in love with Joan of Arc).

I reacted to this by deciding to follow Joan of Arc Marine Le Pen on Twitter (she has 10,000 more followers than 12 hours ago).

The real problem is that the French Socialist government machine has decided to attack what feeds reason itself. Information, data, knowledge, cognition. (Why? The polls are so bad for the Socialists, they are going to be wiped out in the next elections, in 18 months. As they deserved, since they are Socialist in name only: remember Hitler’s “National-Socialists”)

So you want no more Auschwitz? Let knowledge flow. “Social networks” should not ban violence for the sake of banning violence.

Indeed, as we saw with the Nazis, banning the knowledge of the true extent of abominable, abject violence is what made the Holocaust of 2% of humanity in the Second World (because the Nazis and their imperial Jap allies did not stop with killing more than 60 million innocent civilian; they also conducted official wars of aggressions).

So, if one wants morality, one has to exhibit violence, be it only to condemn and eliminate it.

Those who claim to not understand that, as the French Interior Minister, are just abject, abominable cretins.

Then “Social Networks” should consider why the violence is shown. If I show an execution by the Islamist State to condemn it, that is not only OK, it is morally perfect. If the Islamist State shows the same picture for its propaganda, it’s an abject abomination, and it should be censored.

It’s not difficult. One has to exert judgment in light of absolute morality, the one given by 100 million years of evolution, human ethology. Apparently, Twitter is already doing this (Facebook is another matter: it views the female breast as an abject abomination, and blocks it fiercely; it seems the leadership of Facebook hate mammals: “mamma” means breast in Latin).

We humans have to exert meta-judgments. Both on moods and ideas. If Germans had realized how vicious and atrocious the real mood of the Nazi leadership was, they would have recoiled in horror, and withdraw support, as they finally did in 1945. French government’s Foleys follies misrepresenting the State of Islamism, to the point of accusing the national front of Islamism, are of a related vein, and explain the rise of Islamism there.

Ignorance is not just a matter of ignoring some data points. Ignorance is also ignoring shocks to the emotional systems which are intrinsic to the situation being ignored. This is what the leadership of a country like France has ignored all too long. And here, by leadership, I do not mean lesser minds such as the present clowns who gather every week at the presidential palace in Paris to plot the dismal course for 70 millions and most of Europe.

By “leadership” I mean mostly what passes for the intellectual class, those who thought the Eurosterity (= Euro + Austerity) would be a good regime, and Islamophobiaphobia all the philosophy they needed, by praying to the mighty gods of the “markets”, those who thought colonialism was terrible, if from Europe, but the way to go, if from any other power, and so on.

More than ten years ago, I pointed in comments that President Wilson was a racist, and that this had a dominant effect on policy, in the USA, and worldwide. To this day. The New York Times blocked all such comments. The New York Times thus gained more than years in the public revelation that president Wilson was an extreme racist, who implemented racist policies, from inside the USA, onto the world stage, on the grandest scale. Not just this, but racism was, arguably the most important effect of the Wilson presidency. When that policy was not anti-black, it was anti-French. It was also extremely crucial in supporting exterminationist racist oligarchy in Germany, which peaked with World War Two and exterminationist policies. The intimate conviction of exterminationist Germans, thanks to Wilson, was that the USA was on their side. And indeed it was, in many ways.

The New York Times is considered to be the USA’s “Newspaper of Record”, so one would think it is below its dignity to censor its subscribers (other “newspapers of record” in some other countries do not censor me).

Americans Think, and Feel, What They Are Told To Think, and Feel. NYT Led Attack On Iraq, Thus To Islamist State

[New York Times’ articles are reproduced by several hundreds of newspapers in the USA, including most of the major ones… With the exception of WSJ, to which I also subscribe, BTW. .]

Readers of the New York Times were not appraised of the fact that Wilson was a racist, because the New York Times blocked me. This has happened on many subjects, and still happens to this day: if I point out that Quantitative Easing favors Big Banks (“Too Big To Fail”), they block me. The New York Times, and similar pseudo “left” publications are mostly interested that I stay out of sight and out of mind of all and any readers. Even WordPress does this actively (removing my comments on other blogs).

Why so much aggressivity? Because the New York Times actively directs its readers towards brain-killing “blogs” from insipid, ill-informed writers out there. Those “blogs”, one should say “blobs” typically gloat that “Republicans are bad and stupid, Obamacare is the greatest thing ever, Democrats saved the economy, elect Clinton, it will get even better”.

A friend of mine who works in an executive position in the media in New York called my attention to the fact the New York Times ran a long article about its “top commenters”, and that they forgot to mention me (that was tongue in cheek, as he knows the NYT deliberately censors me). Actually the top commentator in the New York Times is probably your truly, if judged by the depth of the contributions, and that is why my comments on the war in Iraq were blocked in 2003, as I exposed the lies of Bush, and its parrot, Judith Miller, a New York Times (then) star journalist, about Iraq (although the NYT supported the destruction of Iraq, neither Obama nor Krugman did).

The NYT enabled comments on its (rather insipid) commentators, and I chimed in with (knowing it would be censored, as usual, I avoided any incendiary adjective):

The New York Times censors me systematically. It has admitted in emails to have blocked thousands of my comments for no reason whatsoever (except that the computer blocked unusual words, I was told).

None of my recent comments were published. Many, in the past, were delayed days. I found increasingly most comments published by the New York Times uninteresting: they support what the New York Times wants to be said.

As I have been systematically censored, I do not bother reading any (all too predictable) official comments anymore. I feel completely excluded, and a bit like a criminal: how do I dare to still send comments to the New York Times, after thousands of my comments were censored? Don’t I get the message?

Don’t I get the message that I do not deserve the little green marker: all what the New York Times wants from me is money (lots of it, over the decades), and not give me a green light.

I will probably end up, after decades of full subscription, cancelling my financial contribution to a paper whose censorship I despise ever more. Indeed, I spent my time searching for truth, and the New York Times declares that what I think is unworthy of publication, a danger, or bore, to society.

Thus, it is becoming ever more painful to read the Times. Let alone insulting, considering the platitudes most of the authorized commentators roll out. Full contributors to the NYT should have comments published right away, except if they exceed bounds defined by law. One day, manipulation of comments will unlawful.

Patrice Ayme

The preceding comment was, of course, censored. As were all my comments on the connection of the policies of the USA and the rise of the Islamist State, all my comments on Islam, or comments pointing out factual lies by the New York Times. Reading the New York Times is, increasingly, taking part into a fraudulent scheme, where correct ideas are diluted into ineffectiveness, or outright blocked (my comments on carbon taxation were also blocked, just as those on how to remedy inequality, and Delaware as the ultimate tax haven, etc.)

The New York Times is not the only Main Stream Media doing this: most do. It is the functional equivalent of search engines biasing searches for profit. It is a form of secret advertising, and should be unlawful for the same reasons as secret advertising is. It should be completely illegal, except if the MSM announces that it is biased, with an agenda, and actively misrepresenting public opinion. The “Daily Kos” has such a warning.

However, like the New York Times, the Daily Kos is lying, but at a higher level. Whereas the Times pretends to be the “Newspaper of Record”, the Daily Kos pretends to be on the “Left”. In truth, it’s not. Otherwise why do they have a skull and crossbones next to my name? In truth the Daily Kos was founded by a CIA employee of Greek origin (that’s where the “Kos” comes from). However all the American “Left” has fallen in the trap, and really feel the “Daily Kos” in on their side, when, in truth, it was just a mercenary for American for profit health insurers, and the like. As most “Left” people are addicted to the Daily Kos, my representation there as skull and crossbones has made me an object of repulsion for most would-be American “progressives”, as intended.

So who does not censor? The Wall Street Journal , and The Economist do not (it pains me to point this out).

That there would be more lying on the “Left” is no surprise, as the “Left” is where all the propaganda is, to persuade “progressives” to support regressive policies. Whereas more right-wing media don’t mind to be exposed to, or even adopt, “progressive” points of view: it shows, to themselves, how open-minded they are.

By supporting president Wilson with an intense cover-up of his racism and manipulations, the New York Times, while mellifluous, that is, sugar-coated, made itself an ally of the Ku Klux Klan. And such was its deepest effect.

As long as “progressives” do not realize they are being played, and how, there is little hope of real progress, it’s going to be Obama Care all over: lots of the correct talk, to hide ever more efficient plutocratic policies.

War scenes in Saint Denis, north of Paris. A seven hour battle, one Salafist woman exploded herself, another terrorist was shot dead, but seven were captured alive (police uses blinding stun grenades). The information about their location was obtained in diverse manners, including amateurs videos.

Dalil Boubakeur, head of Paris Grand Mosque, France’s most prominent Muslim, condemned in the strongest words Muslim terrorists. He claims he saw reports on 1,100 Muslim terrorists inside France, who, he insists, should be arrested immediately. I agree. I agree with all the measures he proposes like throwing out bad imams, closing bad mosques, and having all imams being taught French law, and instilling it, etc. However, the fundamental texts of Islam contain huge amounts of prescribed violence described as orders from God. (It gets even worse with the Hadith, which is much more explicit, even ordering to kill all Jews to have the final judgment: Hadith 41; 685 and the like.)

(There are 7,800 “Fiche S” Islamist terrorists in France. Most of them are not followed: following one individual takes tens of inspectors. There is only one solution: explusion.)

War Against Qur’an In Paris, Nov. 18, 2015

However, I do not agree with Boubakeur’s basic precept that: “The Islamist State is not Islam.”

This the fundamental error. The Islamist State is pure Islam.

If Boubakeur does not want pure Islam, that is, of course, perfect. legally, sociologically and politically necessary, and desirable in all ways. Certainly pure Islam should be condemned and discarded.

It is not just a question of sexism:

Quran 2:223 – “Men have authority over women because God has made the former superior to the latter, and because men spend their wealth to maintain women. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and forsake them in beds apart, and beat them up.”

No, it’s a question of basic security. God, as depicted in the Qur’an, is a maniac:

Quran 3:56 – “As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.”

Quran 5:33 – “Crucify or amputate the hands and feet of those who make war against Allah and Muhammad. This is the recompense of those who fight against Allah and His Messenger, and hasten about the earth, to do corruption there: they shall be slaughtered, or crucified, or their hands and feet shall alternately be struck off; or they shall be banished from the land. That is a degradation for them in this world; and in the world to come awaits them a mighty chastisement.”

Quran 5:38 – “As for the man who steals and the woman who steals, cut off their hands as punishment for what they have earned, an exemplary punishment from Allah..”

Quran 8:12 – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”

Great Britain under Tony Blair (a plutocrat often decried here) took drastic measures against Islam in 2005. Special services were enabled. The leading Islamist in London, long free to express his venom, in the guise of freedom of speech, was deported to the USA, where he was promptly condemned to life in prison.

Russia engaged long range supersonic bombers, and now totals one third of its entire strategic force. France will ramp up with even more air force within a few days, double what she engaged in Libya. Putin ordered his forces to cooperate with the French, including at sea.

The Prime Minister of Qatar was received in Paris by the French PM. Discreetly (however, there was a red carpet). Qatar, at best, enables Muslim terrorist groups finances… And, at worst, finance them directly.

The most shocking sequence from the battle was a young Salfist woman who testified on TV about the battle. Only her eyes could be seen, the rest of her was covered by a black garb. How can that be legal?

It should not be.

First the United Nations recognizes that attacking a people culture’s on its own territory (here Salafists invading Europe) is a form of holocaust (more precisely, the Geneva Convention does).

Second, just as important, the French police gathered important information on the terrorists from videos, and the faces they saw. (The problem of women, or even men hiding bombs showed up during the Algerian War; paratroopers defeated it by using torture so quickly they got information which allowed to reveal the entire networks, and terminate them; that was completely different, though, from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld sort of torture which was very wrong for many reasons.)

The established order is very bad, granted. Yet what the Qur’an proposes is way worse.

Why is the Qur’an so bad? Precisely because its very badness took the more civilized Greco-Romans and Persians completely flat footed. Before they knew it, their best warriors and potential draftees were all dead. It’s a long story; Persian and Romans expected slavery and war prisoners, negotiations. Instead they got an enemy who killed the wounded on battlefields, and sent assassins all over the land to kill every man who could bear arms.

Meanwhile in Marseilles three youths with ISIS clothing stabbed a Jewish teacher. Meanwhile WordPress promoted an entire set of essays on the Paris tragedy, in a mixture of Politically Correct and New Age mood (what makes us sad is good, because we will find our true selves). I sent comments, they were censored. So was a quote from Voltaire. In other happy new, the New York Times has censored me 100% throughout this episode. What these outfits are doing is to, actually support Islamist terrorism (no I did not send such a comment to them, this is strictly between us). Methinks that the absolute censorship of any not just critique, but even quotes of the Qur’an, as above, is the real root of the problem. From what I figured out now looking at time stamps, a quote in the Qur’an long agois probably why The Guardian censors me. This is an amazing state of affairs: if one quotes reality, one gets censored. No wonder Islamists are angry (in a way I am in the same boat as they are, just from the other side of the Styx).

If nothing else, this entire adventure should spawned a renewed interest in real history, and how it breeds moods.

Humanity Good, Institutions Bad? Not so simple. Evil Rule (Pluto-Cracy) is a fundamental consequence of human nature, amplified by civilization.

In “Human Kind“, 14th October 2015George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 14th October 2015, suggests that:“Fascinating new lines of research suggest that we are good people, tolerating bad things.”

Sounds good. It’s very self-congratulatory: defining oneself as “on the left”, “liberal”, etc. has much to do with self-satisfaction about what a great human one is. I sent the following comment:

“Saying that “people are good, while tolerating bad things” is an ineffective morality. The crux, indeed, is the moral nature of institutions, controlled by a few, rather than whether humans are kind or not.”

That observation of mine was censored, as all my comments to Monbiot in the Guardian are. Human kind? Thus Monbiot readers’ minds are kept safe from my dreadful influence (lest readers flee the Guardian, and starts reading my site?).

Cephalopods Are Highly Intelligent, But They Have No Cultural Intelligence., Thus Stay Mental Miniatures

Meanwhile in the terror war occupation in Israel, in a few days, more than 40 young Palestinians got killed. One by one. Human kind? If something looking like a Palestinian moves, it gets shot. Some Jewish Israelis got actually shot because other Israelis thought they looked like the enemy (hey, they are all supposed to all be Semites! One very blonde beauty with very long hair who happened to be an Israeli soldier shot dead a Palestinian youth who may have pricked her: she is OK, don’t worry).

Cephalopods are surprisingly intelligent. They even use tools (the definition of Bergson of man as Homo Faber, Homo Artisan-Of-Hard-Materials is to be questioned). However, cephalopods experience short, brutish, asocial lives, and that boxes in their intelligence. This demonstrates that fully-dimensioned intelligence is social, and, in particular, cultural.

Superior intelligence is not just about the individual, it’s about the collective. Our biosphere, our part of the biosphere, is collectively intelligent (somewhat as in the movie Avatar).

Before I quote the interesting part of Monbiot’s article (which mainly quotes others), let me re-iterate my main thesis on altruism and love:

All advanced brain animals have to love, love enough to raise the young. To say love dominates, is saying we have brains grown with culture. It’s an important thing to say. And it explains the experiences Monbiot mentions.

Compare to the poignant fate of cephalopods, whose bright intelligence starts from scratch, with no culture, whatsoever. Cephalopod intelligence shines brightly, and quickly peters out, in a flurry of new born eggs.

So, the difference between us and squids is that we are adorned with philosophers, and other thinkers. The scorn Monbiot heaps on them is neither kind, nor wise, not to say arrogant, coming from someone with a simple journalist background (and it shows!).

“Areview article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology points out that our behaviour towards unrelated members of our species is “spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals”. While chimpanzees might share food with members of their own group, though usually only after being plagued by aggressive begging, they tend to react violently towards strangers. Chimpanzees, the authors note, behave more like theHomo economicus of neoliberal mythology than people do.”

That is not just a funny joke, but a deep observation, that traders are just enraged chimps. However, to view chimpanzee behavior as typical of other animals is erroneous. Chimpanzees are half-savannah animals. I saw one once in an area with small, very small, and sparse trees, and the first serious forest was weeks of travel away. Not surprisingly, he was acting fiercely and dangerously, in an area roamed by lion prides. Lions having a look at him, won’t try to come close: he shook an entire small tree he was hanging from, and swung away, with incredible power and speed, after flashing his four inches canines.

Thus Monbiot go off the deep end with chimpanzees. Here is a more balanced view: humans keep much in common with chimpanzees. They both descend from common ancestors (who may have been more Homo like than Chimp like: we don’t really know, however fossils, and logic, point in that direction).

“Emotionally and socially, the psychology of chimps is very similar to humans,” says famous primatologist Frans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta (a Dutch who started his famous observations in the Netherlands; universities in the USA have more money).

For instance, de Waal noted, chimps have shown they can help unrelated chimps and human strangers at personal cost without apparent expectation of personal gain, the sort of selfless behavior often naively claimed as unique to humans. They also display culture, with groups of chimpanzees socially passing on dozens of behaviors such as tool kits, and methods from generation to generation that are often very different from those seen in other groups. There are basically as many Chimpanzee cultures as chimpanzee tribes (and that’s thousands).

“The big difference I see going for us is language,” de Waal said. “They can learn a few symbols in labs, but it’s not impressive in my opinion compared to what even a young child can do. They don’t really symbolize like we do, and language is a big difference that influences everything else that you do — how you communicate, basic social interactions, all these become far more complex.”

Mathematics is, first of all, a language, remember.

The hyper aggressivity of Chimpanzees is related to their evolution: “They don’t like cooperating with strangers, that’s for sure,” de Waal said. Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham suggested this pattern of genetic (so to speak) violence may have been part of humanity’s legacy for millions of years. Yet, de Waal observed that based on what the canines of Ardipithecus suggest, “chimpanzees may be specialized in that regard [hyperviolence]. It’s only with the special recent human conditions of settlement and agriculture that gave us the incentive to worry about wealth, leading us to become warriors that way.”

This is close to my thesis: EVIL RULE (“Plutocracy”) was made possible by civilization. Before that it was just Demonic Males. Demonicity plus civilization = Evil Rule.

Compare de Waal’ subtlety with Monbiot’s imbalanced enthusiasm characteristic of the journalist he is:

“Humans, by contrast, are ultra-social: possessed of an enhanced capacity for empathy, an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare and an ability to create moral norms that generalise and enforce these tendencies.

Such traits emerge so early in our lives that they appear to be innate. In other words, it seems that we have evolved to be this way. By the age of 14 months,children begin to help each other, for example by handing over objects another child can’t reach. By the time they are two, they start sharing things they value. By the age of three, theystart to protest against other people’s violation of moral norms.”

Altruism is shown by nearly all advanced animals, because that’s how intelligence is grown. Thus, it’s not about material rewards. On board (so to speak) systems reward altruism intrinsically. Monbiot again:

“Afascinating paper in the journal Infancy reveals that reward has nothing to do with it. Three to five-year-olds are less likely to help someone a second time if they have been rewarded for doing it the first time. In other words, extrinsic rewards appear to undermine the intrinsic desire to help. (Parents, economists and government ministers, please note). The study also discovered that children of this age are more inclined to help people if they perceive them to be suffering, and that they want to see someone helped whether or not they do it themselves. This suggests that they are motivated by a genuine concern for other people’s welfare, rather than by a desire to look good. And it seems to be baked in.

The heated debate is happening because the sort of view I defend (the view in Avatar, that of global intelligence, one could say) is progressing against the very reduced Survival-Of-The-Fittest approach.

The difference between us and squids is that we are adorned with philosophers, and the scorn journalist such as Monbiot heaps on them is neither kind, nor wise, not to say arrogant.

Humans are intrinsic scientists and philosophers, not just lovers and warriors. To try to say they are all one, and not the others misses the big picture.

The left, by insisting that humans are kind, underestimates the evil institutions are capable of. Institutions, although moral persons, in the legal sense, are not held back by human ethology in the behaviors they are capable of. (Nazism provided with plenty of example of that: even the very worst Nazis, including Himmler or Eichmann, found really hard to go all the way, and could do it, only by using institutional tricks, making institutions, Nazi institutions to force them to do what even them found too hard to do.)

Let’s not underestimate institutionalized evil. It has no bounds, whatsoever. Nazism, or Stalinism, were not about just a few very bad guys, they were about evil institutions, including a Prussianized army (in contrast to a human one). Let’s build human kind institutions that cannot not be commandeered by just a few (as our entire democracy-through-representatives regime gangrening the West, not to say the world, is).

Thus, to progress morally will mean to progress in the intelligence of the institutions we will set-up to rule over us. Hence moral progress will be a consequence, and only a consequence, of scientific and technological approfondissement (deepening).

Our friend the half-philosophers may start to huff and puff, as “Franks” were citizens of a federation (actually two of them, the one of the Sea, and the one of the River; the one of the Sea, or more exactly, Salt, is now known as Salian, or Salic).

Whereas “Islam” is a thought system, devised by some Arab warriors (PBUH), who got a good gig going for themselves.

To put in the same basket an ethnicity and a religion is what some half-philosophers would love to call a “category mistake”. The irony is that I know (the basics of) Category Theory, and they don’t.

In other words, because I know of functors, I can mix and match different categories such as Franks and Islam, and be relaxed about it (instead of being all gripped and unimaginative, as the average constipated half-philosopher; notice in passing that the concept “functor” was invented by the philosopher Carnap in linguistics).

The historian Pirenne, long ago, suggested the thesis that the collapse of the economy in the High Middle Ages was caused by the Islamists (Islam confiscated most of the Roman empire, and imposed a total embargo, cutting not just the Paper route, but the Silk Road).

Don’t worry, anybody involved will soon die, and things will calm down, this is Putin’s way.

There is a clear self-censorship going on throughout the West right now, because people are scared of these fanatics, the Putinists, and the Islamists. This, in turn, is deleterious to any critical mood, thus discourse, thus adverse to fixing any problem.

One cannot have a sane public discourse if one cannot even draw a human being. Having public insanity in place of public discourse will affect the Republic, to the point it will die, and that is why it died in all and any nation that submitted to Submission (aka “Islam”).

TODAY’S ISLAMISTS: MORE BARBARIAN THAN THE FRANKS, 16 CENTURIES AGO:

As it rose Christianism destroyed the Roman Republic (or what was left of it). In 363 CE, under fanatical emperor Jovian, an ex-general, a systematic policy of burning libraries got started (Jovian may have been behind the assassination of laic emperor Julian, I am speculating). In 381 CE under ex-general Theodosius, then emperor, laws were passed to enact a “War Against the Philosophers“. Heresy (“making a choice”) became punishable by death.

The Roman empire, which still had many characters of a Republic (which officially it was… Now a “Christian” Republic) exploded.

However, in the next century, in the West, the Franks took control, and build a Catholicism so moderate that it made Paganism, Judaism, and Apostasy all legal (and conversions in all directions).

Interestingly, the Franks, who soon built what they called “Europe”, as an empire, have the reputation of uncouth savages. “Frank” means Ferocious, not just Free.

But the Franks had no problem with Catholics becoming Jews: entire village converted, until the priest was the only Christian in town. Charlemagne himself, 4 centuries after the Franks acceded to power, had his friends call him “David”, because he wanted to be like Israel’s King David (not a friend of God, according to the Bible).

Compare with the savagery of Islam: somebody who leaves Islam is to be killed, say the Hadiths.

So what of the supposed great intellectual tradition of “Islam”? That sounds strange, on the face of it. What about the great intellectual tradition of Christianism? Well, the answer is that there is no such a thing: as soon as he became a fanatical Christian, Pascal produced nothing. All great “Christian” intellectuals are intellectuals first, and, second spent the reminder of their mental capabilities avoiding the fire in which the church wanted to throw them.

In France alone, around 1530, three major philosophers were burned alive for having contradicted Catholicism. This explains why Descartes, a century later, preferred to live in the Netherlands.

Contrarily to repute, the situation with Islam was even worse. At least, in the West, intellectuals could engage the Church in full combat, and they often won. This is a direct consequence of the Frankish leadership submitting the Christian leadership, starting in the Fifth Century. After that time, the Church was never again the government of the West (except inside the Papal states, a gift of Charlemagne, later de facto rescinded).

Famously, around 1300 CE Philippe IV of France and his vassal the English king engaged in full submission of the Pope and his army. The Pope and the Templars both ended judged, dead, and, more importantly, taxed.

So what of these great Muslim thinkers? The answer is that most of them were, truly Jewish or Christians, or very recently “converted”, or then did not finish too well.

ISLAMIST SCHOLARS WANT TO KILL YOU:

The fact is, the greatest Muslim university, Al Azhar in Cairo, is definitively founded on what the Franks, 15 centuries ago, would have viewed as barbarian principles. It actually refused to condemn the “Islamist State” as not conform to Islam.

Al Azhar has decided that those who renounce Islam and their children ought to be killed:

“In the name of Allah Most Gracious Most Merciful

Al-Azhar

Fatwa Committee

A question from Mr. Ahmed Darwish who presented the question through Mr. (Blanked out) of German nationality:

A Muslim man of Egyptian nationality married a Christian woman of German nationality. The two spouses agreed that the aforementioned Muslim man would enter the Christian religion and join the Christian creed.

What is the ruling of Islam regarding this person’s situation?

Are his children considered Muslims or Christians and what is their ruling?

The Answer:

All praises are due to Allah, lord of all the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the greatest of all messengers, our master Muhammad and upon his family and companions all together. As for what follows:

We inform that he has apostatized after having been in a state of Islam, so he should be asked to repent. If he does not repent, he should be killed according to the sharia.

As for his children, so long as they are small they are Muslims. After they have attained maturity, if they remain in Islam then they are Muslims. If they leave it, then they should be asked to repent. If they do not repent, they should be killed. And Allah knows best.

Our civilization was founded on rejecting this sort of savagery on the part of Christianism. When the Islamists appeared, the Franks considered them to be a Christian sect, the Sons of Sarah (Saracens). Let’s persist in rejecting the savagery.

Antique Greece was not just defined by what it built, but what it rejected, the Barbarians (those whose talk sounded animal-like: barr… baa). One cannot be positive all the times, otherwise positivity itself loses meaning.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S: After publishing the preceding, it came to light that the Islamist State, applying literally the savage texts that guide them, destroyed Mesopotamian art more than twice older than the invention of Islam by the raiders (Muhammad and the father of his 6 years old child bride, etc.). isil-video-shows-destruction-mosul-artifacts-150226153158545

Idiots draw guns, for the worst reasons, geniuses draw the world, for the best reasons.

All too many in the Anglosphere condemns Freedom of Expression, though. The Financial Times’ Tony Barber judged that the massacre of famous French cartoonists, writers and thinkers was well deserved. He found « stupid» and « irresponsible » some of the covers of Charlie Hebdo.

(There were so many protests from readers, that the FT withdrew the passage later; notice that, from my point of view, the Financial Times has been a great apostle for the destruction of civilization, so it’s coherent that it would editorialize that assassinating thinkers is justified. For more on some of the despicable opinions of Mr. Barber, see below.)

The central point of thinking anew is that it hurts. Islam is aware of that point: Jihadism is first an effort upon oneself, to improve oneself. (Jihadism such as attacking others, and chopping people’s heads off is only fourth on a list of five type of Jihadism!)

Why does it hurt? Because it requires lots of energy to change one’s neurological networks. PPP

As Homo is a social animal, thinking anew will hurt socially. The majority of French people has been hurt, at one point or another, has been hurt by French satirical newspapers. There are several, and the satirical mood extends throughout out French newspaper and French society. There was long a virulent streak of critique in French society. A law of 1881 strictly protects freedom of press and caricature.

Violent French caricature was centuries old, by the time that the Marquis de Sade depicted with relish the leaders of the West as sadistic torturers and killers.

Actually I have tracked ferocious satire and critique down to at least the Sixteenth Century. Not just Rabelais, but, when an attempt was made to kill Henri IV, one of many, a writer immediately published a book lauding the would-be assassin (who had been executed already) and calling for a repeat, ASAP. Nowadays this sort of Freedom of Expression would be viewed as going to far. Anywhere in the West. But the Enlightenment was made of it.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal presented the terror attack in Paris as front page, with several articles. With main picture of the assassination of the police officer (a second or so before the picture I put).

However the San Francisco Chronicle (Silicon Valley) mentioned it only in a very small corner of its “Top of the News”. The main stories were about a judge allowing Foie Gras back (after a ten year ban), and the Golden Gate closed for the repairs during weekend.

The New York Times reproduced a few very mild Charlie Hebdo cartoons, adding that others, more famous, could not be reproduced as: “The New York Times has chosen not to reprint examples of the magazine’s most controversial work because of its intentionally offensive content.”

How does the New York Times knows it’s “controversial”, and “offensive”? Is that the opinion of the Islamist State?

Simply put, this is censorship. This is the New York Times crowing about censorship. But not just that. It is much worse than that. It goes down two circles of horror, as Dante would say.

The New York Times pontificates that the victim, Freedom of Expression, is “controversial”, “intentionally offensive”.

If the victim was from rape, the New York Times, thanks to its saurian brain, would know it’s not “cool” (“cool” is the ultimate expression in Silicon Valley) to accuse the victim to be “controversial”, “intentionally offensive”. It would not be “Politically Correct”.

That’s what “Political Correctness” is all about: faking thinking. Actually attacking Freedom of Expression is worse than rape or simple murder, even mass murder, as it enables ALL forms of violence, lethal or not.

Attacking Freedom of Expression is a direct attack against civilization. Indeed, civilization is all about minds meeting and debating: there is both its attraction and its advantage.

Neither meeting, nor debating, can be without Free Expression.

Censorship is why the New York Times has put me officially on a watch list, for years and blocks so many of my comments, that I am reading the paper less and less. [Although a NYT subscriber for decades] I am officially ”not trusted”. If the New York Times officially does not trust me, why should I trust it?

A dictator dictates. This is exactly what the New York Times does. It dictates what it thinks its commenters should say. I said recently something technical about Stoic Philosophy, following an ignorant article in the New York Times. I was censored. Because it’s an outrage to roll out information showing the NYT does not know what it is talking about.

And there is a difference between my comments and the NYT propaganda: when I said, for example in 2003, that the New York Times was lying about Iraq, I had detailed arguments (later proven right, as the NYT invented facts about Iraq, repeating just what Bush wanted it to say). The New York Times has never told me ONCE why any of my comments was blocked. I actually believe that such a behavior violates one the foundations of democracy, equal speech, and ought to be illegal.

After all, the New York Times is officially recognized, as all newspapers are. This makes it, to some extent, as all employees of newspapers and magazines, officially recognized agents of the state.

As such, it, and all newspapers and magazines, as state sanctioned professional organizations, ought to enforce democracy. In particular, not violate it.

All the work of Charlie Hebdo, and other satirical media was, and is, meant to be controversial and offensive.

Socrates was controversial and offensive. He died from it. He died, for it.

Self-satisfied censorship is exactly why the USA is intellectually second rate, and always will be, as long as this attitude persists.

A FEW MORE REFLEXIONS:

The next day a French born policewoman was killed deliberately in a terrorist incident involving a similar, heavily armed terrorist (she was hit three times, in the back).

Bernard Maris, also assassinated at Charlie Hebdo, was long a member of the group “Attaque”, and was stridently anti-liberal. He wrote columns in the press, including CH. A prominent shareholder of Charlie Hebdo, Maris was also a member of the Banque de France board (since 2011). So progressive, anti-plutocratic forces lost a strong advocate.

Recent attacks in the West by Qur’an inspired terrorists were from individuals who had been actively prevented to go to join the war in Syria. One may therefore wonder if that is a good strategy. Instead Denmark helps to recondition those who have been there illegally.

Recently Daesh/Islamic State executed more than 100 of its own foreign fighters. They had committed the crime of wanting to return home. So obviously, they had come to disagree with the whole Islamist terror thing.

One can deduce from this that it may be better to not be so strident, and effective at preventing disgruntled youth to go fight there. Or just to go there.

Instead, why not let them examine the situation for themselves? Those who go help the like of the Islamist State ought to be seriously prosecuted, but only if they commit serious crimes. They should also be supported if they want to be re-instated in the West. (Some of the most experienced Secret Service types share this opinion.)

Here some more of the Financial Times prose on Charlie Hebdo: “Charlie Hebdo has a long record of mocking, baiting and needling French Muslims. If the magazine stops just short of outright insults, it is nevertheless not the most convincing champion of the principle of freedom of speech. France is the land of Voltaire, but too often editorial foolishness has prevailed at Charlie Hebdo.”

Editorial foolishness!

Financial Times’ Barber pursued: “This is not in the slightest to condone the murderers, who must be caught and punished, or to suggest that freedom of expression should not extend to satirical portrayals of religion. It is merely to say that some common sense would be useful at publications such as Charlie Hebdo, and Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, which purport to strike a blow for freedom when they provoke Muslims, but are actually just being stupid.”

At least two of the people assassinated at Charlie Hebdo were “Muslim”: the police officer who rushed to the rescue of Freedom of Expression, and one of the authors and journalists of Charlie Hebdo. Apparently those two did not feel threatened by Charlie Hebdo, but, instead, collaborated with it so bravely that they risked their lives.

Claiming, as the Financial Times does, that provoking dangerous fanatics is provoking all Muslims, means that the Financial Times view all Muslims as dangerous fanatics. That’s sheer racism.

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.”

Notice the totally obscene confusion: the Holocaust was the deliberate assassination of more than a dozen million people for so-called “racial” reasons (it’s not just the so-called “Jews” who were killed). Destruction of property, or desecration and slander, especially of people dead for more than a millennium, do not compare.

By pontificating that saying something not kosher, in the eyes of some beholder, about the so-called “Prophet” is in the same category as the killing of millions, Obama has clearly gone to the Dark Side. Or maybe his speechwriters, and he had no idea, or comprehension about what he was reading like a parrot.

Obama is supposed to defend Freedom of Expression. Instead he defended fanaticism of the worst type. So Charlie slandered, in the eyes of some beholders, and in the eyes of Obama, a guy long dead. And the president of the USA insinuates that the slandering of one long dead, is like being an accomplice to the killing of millions. So now the bullets fly.

Who is culprit? These ignorant youth, who were orphans, seized by a giant propaganda machine, or the much respected Nobel Peace Prize, much adulated throughout the West, supposedly defending civilization while talking like a fanatic from the Middle Ages? Who caused what? Who is the most despicable?

Plutocrats control the thinking, thus the law. In the USA, it is unlawful for Medicare, the public health insurance for seniors, to discuss the price of drugs with (private) providers. If a drug company asks for an outrageous price for a drug, Medicare has to say yes.

However, private insurers can negotiate all they want. I asked a health care executive if this was fair. He smiled sardonically: “It’s the law.”

Krugman is increasingly discovering that plutocracy is a problem (although he is careful to not use the word too much, as it smells, literally, of sulfur). He wrote an excellent editorial in the New York Times, January 2, 2015 (time flies, happy New Year!)

Income to 2008. Return of Feudalism: It Has Got Worse Since.

Says Krugman: “What you see is the surge by the global elite (the top 0.1, 0.01, etc. would be doing even better than his top 1%), plus the dramatic rise of many but not all people in emerging markets. In between is what … I’d say corresponds to advanced-country working classes in general, at least if you add post-2008 data with the effects of austerity. I’d call it the valley of despond…”

I sent a comment putting things in historical perspective. The New York Times censored it (I am on the NYT’s official watch and censor list). Here is my comment below. I will comment more on what Krugman said, after it.

Patrice Ayme (censored by NYT): “Agreed to all. Let me add more perspective. Plutocrats rose after World War One, especially in the USA, by acquiring effective control of Germany, through the good offices of Dr. Schacht (Germany’s top banker, a pawn of JP Morgan), Henri Ford (financing Hitler massively), IBM (monopoly of computing in Germany).

This allowed to turn around the anti-monopoly laws of Teddy Roosevelt. One could argue that Hitler’s Reich was an American plutocrats’ puppet. By 1945, the USA was master of the world.

However, the US army (16 million young soldiers trained to kill), had to be pacified, so GIs were treated like kings (thanks to a 93% tax on the wealthy). The economy boomed.

However, what plutocrats want is to rule: that means they want the Commons despondent. Their world domination could be accentuated by repeating, worldwide, what they had done with Germany, Italy and even the USSR between the wars. They invested far away from Western workers.

The same situation exactly led to the implosion of the Roman economy. But, first, by voiding the core of the empire of work and power, Roman plutocracy insured for itself several centuries of rule.

The same psychology is at work today: plutocrats want to deprive of power who could take it away: the Western Middle Class. “Austerity” is a just a ruse that way. Its true validity is that it diverts money and power from We The People to the richest people in the world, by fiscally means.

Wealth organize its subjects’ minds all over. No hope?”

No hope to see such ideas in the New York Times: the preceding was censored, as deserved for doubting the goodness of the institutions and history our masters have set-up. By censoring such facts, and ideas, the plutocrats insure that their satanic conspiracy can blossom ever more. The facts above are correct, and there are much more, thousand more, like them (I have detailed them in preceding essays).

One can literally said that American plutocrats used Nazism as a tool.

I talk all the time to very educated Americans and Europeans who are persuaded that the USA did all it could against Hitler: the cover-up has splendidly held. So they have no idea of what we see today is a continuation of a process started a century ago. And that it can lead to the worst, because it already did.

Some American friends I had for years called me an uneducated Satan for evoking such facts, and have not talked to me once ever since. It is the world upside down, the inversion of all values.

The collaboration between American plutocrats, and the government they control went on, during and after the World War. Both institutionally, and individually: IBM made itself busy helping the Allies after the Nazis capitulated (they had the monopoly of organizing in Hitler’s Reich). Tens of thousands of Nazis escaped under USA supervision.

The other day, I saw a documentary on TV explaining to me how great the Nazi engineers who built rockets were, and how they got to the moon. Yes, they got to the moon (Saturn V employed more than 100 Nazi engineers). The documentary forgot to mention the tens of thousands of slaves who died in underground rocket factories managed by the same characters.

Klaus Barbie, well known to have tortured to death around 5,000 people in Lyon, personally, and having boasted about it lyrically, was in CIA employ for decades afterwards; the French arrested him in Bolivia and brought him to trial later. Barbie had tortured to death tens of British agents, of both genders, not just the French. Maybe he killed some Americans from the OSS too, I don’t remember. The CIA knew this very well, but it was headed by lawyer Dulles, who represented 1,000 Nazi companies before WWII.

“In 2014, soaring inequality in advanced nations finally received the attention it deserved, as Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” became a surprise (and deserving) best seller. The usual suspects are still in well-paid denial, but, to everyone else, it is now obvious that income and wealth are more concentrated at the very top than they have been since the Gilded Age — and the trend shows no sign of letting up.

But that’s a story about developments within nations, and, therefore, incomplete. You really want to supplement Piketty-style analysis with a global view, and when you do, I’d argue, you get a better sense of the good, the bad and the potentially very ugly of the world we live in.”

The potentially very ugly has been seen many times in the past, all over the world, from Japan to Central America: feudalism, and, or, giant war(s), sometimes for millennia.

Even the Roman Republic, which was extremely aware of the plutocratic problem, and had been built around the idea to not fall into it again, fell into it, after a long degeneracy, with “Senatus Princeps” Augustus. (Princeps evolved in the word “Prince”).

The rest of Krugman’s essay is a rewording of what I have been saying for more than a decade in writing. A delight to read, and I will comment on it in another essay, because I do not have the time now, and readers tend not to have time for long essays, either.

Krugman finally pays attention to the thought control the greedy oligarchies have achieved. The power is in the discourse. (As Foucault, and others, noticed.)